Comparing Individuals With PPA to Individuals With AD: Cognitive and Linguistic Profiles

Abstract

Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) is a degenerative condition characterized by the progressive loss of language function. In PPA, aphasia is the most prominent deficit at onset. On the other hand, memory deficits are the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease (AD). The first aim of the study was to establish differences on neuropsychological testing and connected speech production between Greek-speaking individuals with AD and PPA. The second aim was to investigate the executive deficit involvement in the two conditions. Ten individuals with PPA and 9 individuals with AD took part in a comprehensive cognitive-linguistic evaluation. Fifteen demographically matched neurologically healthy adults served as controls. Participants were evaluated using a battery of neuropsychological measures. Quantitative production analysis and acoustic analysis were performed to calculate narrative and temporal measures of the participants' speech. Participants with PPA differed significantly from participants with AD on linguistic measures. They performed worse on the long frequent sentences' subtest of the Sentence Repetition Test and they produced fewer narrative and unique words in picture description. They also produced shorter, less elaborated sentences, and made more phonological errors. The two groups did not differ significantly on memory, executive, visuospatial and semantic composite measures. Compared to neurotypical adults, participants with AD were impaired in memory, and executive function. They also exhibited lexical retrieval difficulties, as well as difficulties in linguistic tasks with an increased processing load. Participants with PPA performed within normal limits on the delay conditions of episodic memory measures. However, they too were impaired in executive tasks, especially for short-term memory and verbal fluency. The production of phonological errors, difficulty in repeating long frequent sentences, and the production of simple and short sentences has differentiated participants PPA not only from neurotypical controls but also from participants with AD. No single measure could differentiate the AD group from the other two groups. These findings should be interpreted with caution considering the small sample size.

A Systematic Review of the Quantitative markers of speech and language of the Frontotemporal Degeneration Spectrum and their potential for cross-linguistic implementation

“…Figure 4B shows that the articulation rate was reduced in more than half of papers investigating nfvPPA, lvPPA, and PSP. As is visible in Figure 4B, there was an overall trend of Greek patients and controls having the highest values for articulation rate and Spanish patient and control samples having the lowest values (Baque et al, 2022;Karpathiou & Kambanaros, 2022;Potagas et al, 2022). However, the lvPPA Spanish and Greek patient samples did not have a significant difference compared to healthy controls while the English patient samples were significantly reduced (Cho et al, 2022;Cordella et al, 2019;Cordella et al, 2017).…”

“…76 papers studying discourse in patients with FTD were included in the final review. 57 of these papers (75% of all papers) studied English-speaking patients, the remaining 19 papers studied patients speaking Spanish (Baque et al, 2022; Matias-Guiu et al, 2020, 2022), Czech (Daoudi et al, 2022; Rusz et al, 2015; Skrabal et al, 2020), Italian (Catricala et al, 2019; Silveri et al, 2014), French (Bouvier et al, 2021; Macoir et al, 2021), German (Hohlbaum et al, 2018; Staiger A., 2017), Dutch (Bruffaerts et al, 2022), Greek (Karpathiou & Kambanaros, 2022; Koukoulioti et al, 2018, 2020; Potagas et al, 2022), Hindi (Sachin et al, 2008), and Korean (Suh et al, 2010) (Figure 2a). Figure 2b shows the geographical representation of the published papers, with a paucity of languages from South America, Asia, and Africa.…”

Non-Linguistic Neuropsychological Profile of Primary Progressive Aphasia: A systematic review

“…En cuanto a la memoria, Méndez et al (2019) dan cuenta que la variante APPvl, en baterías neuropsicológicas de detección enfocadas a la EA alcanzan 1.5 desviaciones estándar por debajo de la media en la memoria verbal que no difiere del deterioro de la memoria en los pacientes con Alzheimer tipo amnésico(EAta), igualmente un peor desempeño en las medidas que reflejaban la memoria de trabajo o de registro de información, fluidez verbal, memoria auditiva a corto plazo y memoria de trabajo verbal al ser comparados con otras variantes de APP, pacientes con Enfermedad de Alzheimer y neurotípicos (Karpathiou & Kambanaros, 2022). El perfil clínico para la APPvl, según los criterios diagnósticos ya establecidos, es de habla lenta y vacilante, anomia, buena comprensión de palabras aislada, dificultad para repetir o raciones, no obstante, Prabhakar et al ( 2019) y Foxe et al ( 2021) añadieron un déficit de m emoria episódica y verbal a corto plazo típico para dígitos, extensión de palabras y repetición de oraciones.…”

“…En cuanto al perfil neuropsicológico no lingüístico de APPvl, las medidas de evaluación cognitiva global, muestran un déficit cognitivo mayor en comparación con APPvs y APPvnf en dominios cognitivos tales como las habilidades visuoconstructivas, el recuerdo inmediato, y el recuerdo diferido (Watson et al, 2018). De la mism a manera, describieron un bajo rendimiento en la función ejecutiva en tareas que impliquen memoria de trabajo y fluidez verbal, sus niveles de atención son sensibles y en lo relativo a la memoria se encuentra comprometida la memoria a corto plazo y la episódica, en tareas que requieren extensión de dígitos y palabras (Owens et al, 2018;Harris et al, 2019;Karpathiou & Kambanaros, 2022). En lo que respecta a la cognición social, la revisión dejo ver que no existe suficiente evidencia que aporte información al respecto, los estudios examinados señalan que no coexisten dificultades significativas (Piguet et al, 2015), aunque otros señalan grados de apatía global al ser comparados con personas sanas (Radakovic et al, 2021).…”

“…1, e00254547, January June, 2022 fluidez verbal de letras y categorías. También se sugiere un déficit en la memoria verbal en aspectos como recuerdo inmediato, recuerdo diferido y memoria de reconocimiento (Karpathiou & Kambanaros, 2022). En este sentido, coinciden con lo revisado por Kamath et al (2018) a través de un metaanálisis del funcionamiento neuropsicológico, cognitivo social y olfativo en las variantes conductuales y de lenguaje de la demencia frontotemporal, hallaron que pacientes con APPvs mostraron mayores déficits en las de fluidez ideacional, atención simple y memoria verbal, así como medidas de inhibición de respuesta y formación de conceptos.…”